I have no headline for this, and I am pretty good at writing headlines. So there! :-)

Gimme a second and let me figure out where it starts.

People make all kinds of claims about Southern Culture. Most of those people don’t actually know what they are a talking about. The only way to know a culture is to live in it. Internalize it. So today I will try and give you a walk in my shoes.

What if you missed the Civil Rights Movement by a few short years, and you began your life thinking it was all over. Settled. Done? Because apparently everyone was now equal and we we done with all that fighting??

What if you grew up, at least at the beginning, in a household which taught you to not say the N-Word in public, but it was ok to use that word from time to time where only White People could hear?

That whole chain of logic is strange to me to this day. I wasn’t taught to not use it because it’s offensive, hurtful, and a symbol of a system of slavery which was still almost a living memory on the day I was born. I was taught not to use it because it would harm me more than help me. It was a lesson in calculated decisions.

I opened my eyes and said “Hello” to this big, beautiful world for the first time in the early 1970s if that helps. I had no idea what the fuck I was in for. I was born in Mobile, which is in Alabama, which is in the United States, which is in the Northern Hemisphere of this one planet . . . etc.

How’s that for a prologue?

Now, I don’t want to write or share the next part of this, but I am doing it anyway. And don’t applaud me until you see if there is even a next post.

The racism, sexism, ( and more and more these days) militaristic nationalism . . . They trouble me.

One of the reasons I have such a hard time just writing this shit and throwing it out there is that it’s hard to look at, and it’s even harder to acknowledge that it’s real.

But it’s real. Talking about it is better than giving it a pass, because talking about it robs it of a little bit of its power.

Know that I am on your side.

Just don’t be looking for another post from me tomorrow. These things take a long time to write. Not because I’m short on words. What I am short on, these days, is courage.

If I take this up again. I will have more to say about emotional and financial manipulation, with a heapin’ helpin’ of religious fundamentalism thrown in to, you know, save my soul.

I remember when The Christian Coalition took over the little churches and weaponized them in the service of the Reaganites. I lived through the AIDS crisis, as a child, and I am not done burying people who were older than me and were damaged by it more than me because they had a more full understanding of what was happening there.

I am not done.

These words are hard to come by these days, though. Composition time is hard to come by. But I think I have more to say.

Hello, gloves. Enjoy being on my hands for the next little while. I will take you off soon.j

Don’t go mouthing off about Southern Culture on account of things you learned about it on the teevee. Don’t give it a pass, either.

This situation is way more complicated than that.

That is all.

Here I Go Again.

I am back to blogging for the next little while. In the early stages of laying out a project that I think will run 8-10 posts, but they’ll be laborious to write and keep to a reasonable length. I plan to finish two of them and then start publishing them weekly once I have a good start on the third.

The objectionable symbol everyone is angry about appears in the top left corner. (Photo by me taken at a moment when Mississippians were all at one another’s throats about the flag. Original caption included because #context.)

Far as the topic goes. It will be an exploration of my own lived experience. It will also be an examination of the particular combination of meanness and hypocrisy that is southern conservative culture. Hopefully I’ll be able to connect both my own experience and the regional political culture to some things that are going on in the country at large right now and have been for a while.

Difficult to write, hard to let go of, uncomfortable to publish. Bound to make some folks unhappy if they read it. Absolutely necessary for me to do at this moment, whether anyone reads it or not.

Before I begin I’ma say this once, and then point back to paragraphs four through six of this post if it comes up again. I am fully aware that neither southerners nor white people have a monopoly on intolerance in this country. And also that I am quite a privileged dude, being white and male and (mostly) able to afford to keep utilities on for myself and those who depend on me for those necessities.

I will also note that if the people who depend on me for the roof and power did not find ways to buy groceries and school supplies, I’d not be able to keep all the utilities on and still buy fuel to get to work. I’m a mature, well-educated person who has never moved further away from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi than San Antonio. That little adventure only lasted about ten months.

I know where the Christian Coalition was born and I understand how it spread. I lived though it. I’ve paid my dues to the point that if criticizing one’s own culture were a privilege in this great country of ours instead of a right, I’d be privileged that way, too.

So I’ve got shit to say all summer long on this here blog, and I give absolutely zero fucks what anyone thinks about it. If you’re just checking in here because I landed in your feed for the first time since 2016 and you’re like “OH. That guy! I was fond of him! What’s he up to now?” But you have a problem with a sober, honest, angry, unequivocally negative critique of southern, conservative (and by extension bigoted, mean-spirited, self-dealing and short-sighted) political culture . . .

. . . your safest course is to get the hell out and not come back until you see a headline at the top of the page which clearly indicates I’m done with this and have lowered the intensity back into the normal range. No hard feelings & no disrespect to you personally intended. Scout’s honor.

If you’re interested this content, or if you’re disinterested but genuinely glad I’m back because you missed me, you should comment on this post and let me know. Comments will be disabled before I post here again.

Done.

Weekend Coffee Share: In Which I Find Myself at a Crossroads

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you I miss writing for the #WeekendCoffeeShare linkup. I also miss writing the pop culture posts, and wanking about social media, and occasionally ranting about politics. Writing — especially high-frequency writing that’s done just for fun — has to be a habit if you’re going to do it consistently. Sadly, I’ve gotten myself out of the habit.

I’d tell you I miss reading a dozen blogs a week and chatting with people on comment threads even more than I miss publishing my own posts. Facebook has somewhat taken over my social media life, because for the last several months, my internet time has come in unpredictable 20- and 30-minute blocks. And let’s just face it. Communication on Facebook is way easier than communicating on blog threads.

Well, I have a lot more free time than I am accustomed to this weekend, so I’m planning to spend quite a bit of time in the blogosphere. After I add this post to the linkup at Part Time Monster, I plan to check out the Princess Bride Linkup Party at WriteOnSisters.com.

I may even re-watch that movie this afternoon and see if I can rush out a post for the linkup myself. You can check out the FAQ here and you can add your own post to the linkup here and you can also share Princess Bride links using the hashtag #PrincessBrideParty. Check it out! It’s sure to be a lot of fun.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you we’re closing in on the time of year where I typically cut back on my blogging and start planning for January. I do this because in my experience, mid-November to late December is the worst time to try and get anything except holiday-themed content seen on the Internet. I’ve blogged so little this year, there’s really nothing to cut back on, but I am still taking stock and trying to make some decisions about what I’m going to do next year.

Part Time Monster and Comparative Geeks have both moved recently and they are both still thriving, so I feel as though I accomplished the two most important goals I set for myself when I came back to the blogosphere three years ago. My blogging, in the first instance, was always about giving either Part Time Monster or Sourcerer a chance to break out. And about forming a community of bloggers that was loose enough to tolerate a broad spectrum of worldviews, but close-knit enough to hang together whether I remained at the center of it or not.

I think Part Time Monster still has a chance to break out, and a lot of the contributors I recruited for Sourcerer during the two years I ran that blog are still talking. In fact, a lot of them are contributing for the new-and-improved CompGeeks. That makes me unreasonably happy. I feel that all the energy and sweat I put into the blogging between 2013-15 was worth it, even though I am a peripheral part of the operation at best (for now).

Getty stock image.

All this said, my own blogs are practically dead. I wasn’t able to bring Sourcerer in for a soft landing. I’ve almost slapped a coda on that blog several times just for the closure, but when I sit down to write the last Sourcerer post ever, I just can’t bring myself to do it. It hasn’t been updated in nearly a year, and the last post is a comics post Luther published for me in the last days before I decided I had to let it go for awhile. Sourcerer at this point is a like a story with no ending and that pains me. It’s still the most valuable piece of internet real estate I’ve ever developed, though — especially when I include the twitter account I built for that blog. That’s hard to let go of.

As far as this blog is concerned, it’s been through several iterations, and it has never performed to my satisfaction. I have around 350 Facebook friends and followers. More than half of those are bloggers and people I met through blogging. Even if I go back to posting a couple of times a week here on a regular schedule, I’m not convinced this blog is ever going to get me more than I’m getting with well-timed public Facebook updates.

So I am not sure where to go with my blogging in the next year. I feel as though I need to either commit myself to publishing one high-quality post per week, or else I just need to walk away. And I have no blog of my own that’s good enough at this point to post my very best stuff, because I can’t get enough readers on my own blogs to make it worth the time and energy I put into my very best posts.

I’m still thinking, but it looks like I’m going to be a contributor at CompGeeks and occasionally at the Monster for the next little while — if I am able to get back to blogging consistently at all. This blog will be for infrequent personal posts and political rants, unless I can find a way to get Sourcerer running again.

I’d love to have some input from those of you who have followed me for a long time, and from those of you who have more blogging experience than me.

This post is nearly 1,000 words long, so I’m calling it a day. Maybe I’ll see you for coffee again once or twice before the holiday season kicks into high gear. Have a photo of my puppy, who I’ve talked about here a time or two before. She’s nearly a year old now, and this was taken a couple of days ago.

Have a great weekend, and keep blogging!